Father: Peter Kleinknecht
Mother: Elizabeth Kitch Kleinknecht
Spouse: Permelia Catherine Stinebaugh
Children:
Robert Cowden Kleinknecht 1868-1951
Sylvia Alberta Kleinknecht 1869-1958
George G. Kleinknecht 1871-1931
Henry Homer Kleinknecht 1873-1957
Willis Webster Kleinknecht 1875-1956
Charles Franklin Kleinknecht 1876-1877
John Calvin Kleinknecht 1878-1952
Joseph Oscar Kleinknecht 1880-1923
Alfred Eugene Kleinknecht 1882-1961
Elzy Edward Kleinknecht 1885-1953
Infant daughter Kleinknecht 1890-1890
Civil War Veteran: 2nd Lt, Co D 59th Reg. U.S.C.I Illinois. 1861-1866 Serving under the command of his older half-brother Col Robert Cowden.
Exerpt from "A Brief Sketch of the Organization and Services of the Fifty-Ninth Regiment of USCI and Biographical Sketches." by Colonel Robert Cowden. Published by United Brethren Publishing House, Dayton, Ohio 1883:
"This officer was born in Crawford County, Ohio, May 10th, 1844, and was reared in the vicinity of Crestline, which was not laid out until 1851. His father, Peter Kleinknecht, whose oldest son he was, was a day-laborer and but twenty-two when Jacob was born. His mother was the widow of David Cowden, who had died in 1838. His advantages for education were only those of the common school. When he was eleven years old his parents moved to Wells County, Ind., where his father died in a few months, of congestive chill, and the mother, now a second time widowed, returned with her children to Ohio. When the war broke out Jacob was laboring for wages on a farm. Though but seventeen years old, he was six feet tall and well proportioned. He enlisted on the 9th of September, 1861, in Company B of the 1st United States Mechanic Fusileers, and was afterward transferred to Company H of the same regiment, and was mustered out with the regiment by order of the Secretary of War on the 29th of January, 1862, and immediately re-enlisted as a private in Battery I of the 1st Illinois Light Artillery, then in camp Douglas, Chicago, where the fusileers were mustered out. In the assignment to duty he was given the lead team on one of the caissons. He served with his piece at the battle of Shiloh, and in all the service of the battery thereafter while he was a member of it. As a child and boy he was remarkable for the absence of everything like fear; nor would he every cry when punished, as most children do, but was provokingly stolid and indifferent under the affliction of severe chastisement. And in this, at least, the child was father to the soldier, for he felt no fear in any place; and it was no hard matter for him to command the rear-guard and sullenly contest every step with the insolent rebels on the retreat from Guntown, as he and Captain Henderson did, thereby winning honorable mention in the official report of Major Foster, commanding regiment. In doing so he only acted his nature, and deserved less praise than a timid man, under the same circumstances, would have earned. On the 23rd of May, 1863, he was taken from the battery, where he had an unspotted record as a soldier, to help recrruit the colored regiment with which his later history was to be identified. On the 6th of June he was mustered with Company D as its first or orderly sergeant, Captain Christopher Fox commanding company. About a year later he was promoted to second lieutenant and retained in the same company. He was with the regiment all the time of its service except one brief leave of absence to visit his home in Ohio, and one detailed to convey some United States prisoners to New Orleans, La. He was, without exception, the youngest officer in the regiment. Since the war he married Miss Permelia Steinbaugh. They have six children, all boys but one, and live on a small farm a few miles from Galion, Ohio. He served as assistant marshal for the taking of the ninth census of the United States in 1870, taking the enumeration of the district in which he lives."